As Dr Salman Khalid describes Israel’s genocide in Gaza from both an observatory and a medical perspective, the discrepancies loom in his account Gaza: A Doctor’s Diary (Pluto Press, 2025), notably in terms of what those outside Gaza could not witness.
Amid his involvement with the medical relief mission Humanity Auxilium, treating Palestinians critically injured or on the verge of death as a result of Israel’s bombing in Gaza, Khalid’s diary entries are a painful reminder of the political and humanitarian injustices inflicted on humanity — the collateral damage, according to Israel and its accomplices.
Forming part of a humanitarian mission, Khalid’s written observations go beyond news reports and live-streamed footage. Writing speaks from the heart, and words — simple words — convey what our eyes process rapidly from one image to the next.
Salman writes, for example, of “shrapnel designed to tear apart human flesh.” Imagining this scene causes far more than pain and discomfort, for how can the mind conceive of such aberrations?
In the preface, Dr Fozia Alvi writes, “While Salman originally wrote his journal to share privately with his close friends and family, reading it revealed a profound truth — the world deserved to witness the raw, unfiltered reality of medicine practiced amidst genocide.”
The initial fear about his own personal safety, while always present, swiftly shifts to the absence of safety for Palestinians in Gaza.
Salman describes the physical ramifications of forced displacement in terms of territory and overpopulation in designated areas. Seeing the scale of destruction, Salman questions the validity, or accuracy, of calling the makeshift dwellings ‘camps’.
He writes, “They are more like random scattered places that were flattened and, without rubble, where a family erected a makeshift tent with sheets on a sidewalk less than 2 ft from the dirt road.”
The shock is palpable, yet nothing prepares the reader for Khalid’s descriptions of the wounded Palestinians needing medical care in an enclave where most hospitals had been decimated.
“Whoever looks most desperate and grabs you by the hand first,” was the reply to Khalid’s question on how to decide who to treat first.
When the sounds of bombs are mentioned, they become cues of the immediate aftermath. Commenting on the absence of foreign journalists in Gaza, Salman writes, “I feel like events like these are often dismissed by people back home because there are only Palestinian journalists reporting them.”
And if explosions are ignored or normalised, nothing can prepare the reader for Khalid’s descriptions of the injuries themselves, and the trauma of families being ripped apart — seeing their loved ones die, becoming desensitised to death, which is a painful experience in itself.
The official death toll can also be read as inaccurate. Salman gives an example of a man who required treatment for urinary retention and went into multi-organ failure within a short time frame. He had to be sacrificed for other cases with a bigger chance of survival.
The man, who required ICU treatment, “will not be counted in the official death toll because a bomb or bullet did not kill him.” This means that deaths resulting from Israel’s genocidal tactic of destroying hospitals will not count towards the genocide toll.
Colostomies are described as just another day in Gaza, in contrast to the West. And indeed, when reading the descriptions of the injuries and under what conditions doctors in Gaza are working during the genocide, colostomies pale in comparison. Not only is hygiene almost impossible, but the patients themselves are usually leaking their own bodily fluids onto the floor.
Of one female patient, Salman writes, “The most attention she received was from the person who mopped her brain off the floor every 20 minutes.”
And the description, which is shocking in its starkness, is “how most Palestinians have ended their lives in the past year,” the author notes.
Salman writes of his own struggles with desensitisation, or compartmentalisation. “I’m starting to view and remember these patients more by their injuries, and less as complete human beings with families and complex, beautiful lives. I’m trying very hard to learn their names, their families, who they were, and what they did, but in the chaos of the waiting and resuscitation rooms, it is often the last thing I’m able to ask.”
But the author also demonstrates the psychological process of gradual realisation as it happens and as it shifts. Time is discussed in terms of events, experiences, and comparisons between the author’s own life and that of Palestinians in Gaza. He cannot imagine prestigious medical institutions in Canada being torn down and their staff imprisoned, yet the medical profession in Gaza has endured all that and more.
Salman starts documenting his observations with a promise to stay neutral. Towards the end of his stay in Gaza, he reflects on his promise to refrain from editorialising but realises that what he is witnessing in Gaza has its own language through which to articulate, besides raising several questions.
“How can we evaluate the psychological torture of dropping a bomb on a tent filled with sleeping children at 1 am?” the author questions.
The reader can also ponder whether language is editorialising when describing horrors that are beyond rational human comprehension. And what is neutrality, if not reporting what one witnesses? Is neutrality permanently jeopardised when one describes the actual consequences of the coloniser’s genocide on the colonised?
This is a short read, but its impact settles within one’s self beyond the pages. Salman brings a fragment of Gaza that reports and alienation kept hidden from sight.
While much of Gaza will intrinsically remain an experience that none other than Palestinians, or those who spent time alongside them, can understand, Khalid’s account returns Gaza to the helm, to tell the stories that cannot be told because of enforced death.
Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger specialising in the struggle for memory in Chile and Palestine, colonial violence and the manipulation of international law
Follow her on X: @walzerscent
